Читать книгу Possessed by an Immortal - Sharon Ashwood - Страница 13

Chapter 6

Vampires were not made for road trips.

The red Lexus IS F Sport luxury sedan had specially tinted windows to block the sun, climate control, a V-8 engine that did zero to sixty miles in five seconds and a sound system calibrated to please extrasensitive hearing, but it was still a metal box on wheels. Mark needed to be outside, with the wind and sky. Free. Alone. He’d lost a good deal of patience along with his humanity, and what remained had been whittled away by the centuries that followed his Turning.

Speed was his only consolation, and the 416 horsepower motor of the Lexus was begging to give it. Except there were humans in the car, too fragile to risk on the twisting roads. Bree was dozing in the passenger seat next to him. Jonathan, wide-awake but silent in the back, clutched a stuffed duck.

Mark hadn’t let on how much he knew, or that he was taking them straight to the Company safe house in Seattle, where they could be protected. Explaining about the Company without revealing the existence of the supernatural was a delicate business, and he wanted the right environment to do it. Bree had to be convinced the safe house, with its guns and rules and guards, wasn’t a jail. If he got it wrong, she might bolt at the first gas station they stopped at, her ailing child in tow.

Mark cast a glance in the rearview mirror. The booster seat—pilfered out of the hospital lost and found—brought Jonathan just into view. The child met his eyes in the mirror. Mark was struck again by the watchful intelligence in that gaze. The kid didn’t miss a thing.

He tried to see Prince Kyle in the boy’s face. The dark hair and brown eyes were similar, but that was inconclusive. Maybe the shape of the eyes was the same, or the way his hair fell across his face, but he didn’t exactly have a poster of the Crown Prince of Vidon taped to his locker door. He couldn’t remember every feature.

Mark made himself smile at the boy and turned his attention back to the road. The sun was up but it was still early, the world fresh and tipped by frost. The rolling land was a rumpled blanket of evergreens patched with gold. The sky was a rich autumn-blue. It was going to be one of those fall days that seemed a parting gift from summer—and all that sun was giving him a splitting headache.

Mark had used the night to get Larson ready for his flight to Los Angeles and to attend to the files on his desk. Larson would be fine—at least from the bullet wound—but the hospital administration might perish from shock when they saw the completed paperwork the next morning.

The wait had served two other purposes. It gave Bree and Jonathan a real night’s sleep, and surveillance teams were less likely to see them leave during the morning shift change. Mark had remained on the alert, but had seen nothing suspicious. If their pursuers were watching the hospital, hopefully they’d given them the slip.

Bree opened her eyes, stifling a yawn. She was still pale with fatigue, the freckles across her nose standing out. “Where are we?”

“We just passed through Sequim.” He focused his attention on the ribbon of highway, ignoring her soft, female smell. Or trying to. He was getting horny and hungry, and wasn’t sure which impulse was in the lead.

She turned around in her seat, checking on her son. “We should find a drive-through for breakfast.”

The scent of woman was one thing. Tantalizing, dangerous, but good. Mark imagined the stench of human food trapped inside the car, and nearly shuddered. “No.”

“Kids need to eat.”

“Kids are sticky.”

“He’ll be hungry.”

“I’m the driver.”

Bree gave him a sharp glance that reproached him and acknowledged his position of power at the same time. “Fine. It’s your car.”

It was. With a dove-gray leather interior. And she’d managed to make him, a centuries-old monster, feel bad about it. He winced. “We can stop at the Gleeford Ferry. There’s better food in town than just drive-through.”

She sank back, turning her face to the side window until all he could see was her long, waving hair. Even it looked disgruntled. “This road we’re on is barely a highway. Wouldn’t it be faster to pick up the I-5?”

“Someone put Puget Sound in the way.”

She made a small noise of impatience. “I guess we’re farther out than I expected.”

“We’ve only been driving an hour.”

“It feels longer.”

He realized she was nervous, but it was coming across as demanding. He stifled a growl. Being alone on his island was much easier. “There are fewer cars here. I can spot someone following us on this route.”

With no further comments, Bree pulled a magazine out of her backpack and started flipping through it. From the corner of his eye, he saw it was one of those thick fashion rags. Each page turn was a sigh of impatience.

Flip. Flip. Flip.

Mark gripped the steering wheel, trying to ignore the sound. To make matters worse, Jonathan was humming tunelessly, thumping his stuffed duck against the car door. He clenched his teeth, summoning inner strength. You are the lion. The hunter that strikes in the night. You have the patience of the leopard in the tree.

Thump. Thump. Flip. La-la-la.

I’m not a thrice-damned cab driver. Another few hours, and he’d be alone again. Breathe deeply. No, then he smelled tasty woman. Open a window. Yeah, that was it.

This was his nightmare. Once before, he had been responsible for a woman and her young. The Knights of Vidon had destroyed them. And I tore the first Nicholas Ferrel and his animals to pieces in retribution. The centuries that followed had been a bloodbath, an endless feud of vampire against slayer as one act of violence demanded payback, then another.

But Mark had taken a different path since then, one of healing instead of death. He desperately wanted to stay on it.

Bree stopped turning pages, gazing out the window again. Her long fingers gripped the magazine so hard the tendons stood out along the backs of her hands. “You don’t think anyone’s following us now, do you?”

Mark cleared his throat. “Not that I’ve seen.”

“What have you seen?”

“Two logging trucks and a pickup full of produce. Unless the gunmen are disguised as squash, we’re safe for the time being.”

“Good.” The word was as packed full of meaning as her glance had been. “It’s been a while since I had a few hours.”

He looked over at her. He was wearing dark glasses despite the tinted windshield, and they washed the color out of her, leaving her in shades of gray. “You mean a few hours to not worry?”

She gave a quick, rueful smile. “To worry about one thing at a time. To focus on normal mom things, like breakfast. Clean clothes. I’ve been carrying this magazine around for weeks and haven’t got past the first ten pages. Getting to read it feels like a scandalous luxury.”

Something made Mark glance in the rearview mirror. Jonathan was watching his mother, picking up every word. Mark wondered how much of it he understood. Probably everything. Kids in trouble grew up fast. Maybe princelings on the lam grew even faster.

“Where’s Jonathan’s father in all this?” he asked.

“Nowhere.” Bree said it quickly, opening up the magazine again. The word was the next best thing to a slamming door.

Mark watched the road, keeping his face turned straight ahead. They were getting near the ferry that would take them to Seattle. He should start laying a little groundwork to prepare Bree for the safe house. “It’s a lot, raising a child on your own.”

“Sure it is. But you do it, whether you’re ready or not.” Her voice was quietly matter-of-fact.

“The guy’s a prince. He can afford child support.”

Her hands froze midflip. “You know who I am.”

Got you. Mark shifted his hands on the steering wheel, as if closing his grip on more than the car. “I figured it out.”

“How?” She pulled herself straighter in the seat. “How did you know?”

“I have a good memory for faces.” Which was true, though he’d made no connection between this woman and the celebutante who’d graced Crown Prince Kyle’s arm four years ago. But now that he’d met Bree, there was no chance he’d ever forget her.

She slumped. “Sue me. I had my fifteen minutes of fame.”

“You weren’t the last girl Kyle showed a good time.” There had been others, including the infamous Brandi Snap, who had nearly wrecked Prince Kyle’s engagement to the much-beloved Princess Amelie of Marcari. “Does Kyle know about Jonathan?”

She gave him a dirty look. “They’ve never met.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Oh, but everyone knows about him, don’t they?” Her tone was steely enough to draw blood. “I worked hard to keep a low profile for a long time. Lived my life, raised my son. Then one day the paparazzi must have been having a slow week, because all of a sudden it was all over the papers—the prince’s bimbo had a baby.”

“Is that who you think is after you?”

“Photographers shoot with cameras, not guns.” She toyed with the edges of the magazine, riffling the pages. “And Kyle isn’t the one giving the order to chase us. He’s a good guy, prince or not.”

Mark was inclined to agree. As one of the Horsemen, he had crossed paths with the crowned heads of several kingdoms, including Prince Kyle. He’d seemed pretty levelheaded—but the fact that he’d had this woman and then let her get away—well, that was just foolish.

Mark turned her story over in his mind, still trying to match the glittering arm candy with the serious, frightened young woman next to him. “Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. A royal court is a well-oiled machine. Kyle is only one piece of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“He might be a nice guy, but there are plenty of people at court who aren’t. It’s not just all parties and polo. Vidon has been at war with its neighbors off and on since the Crusades.”

“But he always knew he would marry Princess Amelie from the kingdom next door. Their families have been fighting forever. He wanted to end the war and, from what he said, so did she. Marriage would unite Marcari and Vidon.”

Her matter-of-fact tone surprised him. “You don’t mind that he’s marrying another woman?”

She shrugged. “He’s a prince. He has to marry a princess. Besides, we were just friends.”

Just friends. Not the statement he’d expected, but relief eased his shoulders. A silence fell over the car for a moment, leaving only the sound of the road and Jonathan’s aimless humming. Mark struggled to tune it out. Whatever kept the kid from talking, it wasn’t his vocal cords.

They passed through a tiny hamlet that was nothing but a gas station and a place that sold pies. A bored-looking horse swished flies and stared morosely over a broken-down fence. Mark checked the rearview mirror. Still no one tailing them.

“Your son can still be used as a pawn, even if he’s not a legitimate heir.”

Bree snapped the magazine shut. “He’s not the heir. He’s not Kyle’s. I wish people would believe me.”

“There are people who might benefit from saying he is.”

“Seriously?” she scoffed. “These are tiny kingdoms. Nice, lots of Mediterranean beaches and all that, but Texas could swallow them both and leave room for snacks.”

“Neither country is big, but the income from tourism, especially gambling, is huge.”

“Still, how would kidnapping Jonathan help anyone?”

Mark wondered how much he should say, but decided she deserved the straight goods. “Not everyone wants the match between Vidon and Marcari. Their feud is so old, it’s become a way of life for some people. Even a means of making money.”

And then there was the whole supernatural issue. Amelie’s father, the king of Marcari, had an old alliance with the vampires. The Company and the Horsemen had his personal support. But right next door, the vampire-slaying Knights of Vidon had kept the feud between the two nations alive—and had most recently left a fan letter in Mark’s bedroom.

Which meant the his-and-hers sets of gunmen were probably the same people. Mark had to get her to the safe house, whether she liked it or not. He turned to Bree, who was biting her nails.

“Think about it,” Mark said softly. “What if people believed Jonathan was the only heir? What if someone stopped Kyle’s wedding to Amelie so there would be no real heirs?” Or what if they killed the royal couple? But Mark didn’t want to say that out loud.

Bree gave him a look packed with excitement, reluctance and another emotion he couldn’t name. “I didn’t put everything together before now. What you say makes more sense than I want to admit to.”

“Why?”

Her grave eyes held a glimmer of something he hadn’t seen before—trust. “Someone tried to sabotage the wedding before. I was there, firsthand.”

Mark tensed, his gut mirroring the conflicting emotions on her face. Knowing her story would connect them. Part of him wanted that. Another part wanted to run free, back to his island, untethered.

But that wasn’t an option. He had a duty as a Horseman. Even more than that, Bree’s vulnerable expression made him push on. “Before?”

“I used to work for a design firm. We got the commission to do the wedding clothes. Weird, eh? I was working on the outfits for my friend’s celebrity wedding. My ex-boyfriend, if you believe the tabloids.”

Mark nearly veered off the road. He knew this part of the story already. “There was a fire in the design studio. It destroyed the whole collection, except the wedding dress. That was found later.” Mark had been one of the Horsemen who’d returned the gown to Princess Amelie. Jack Anderson, the Horseman called Death, had died doing it. By all the fiery hells!

Bree closed her eyes, suddenly looking excruciatingly young. “Yes, all the clothes for the wedding were burned up. Except for the dress.” A tear leaked out from under her lashes.

“What is it?” Mark asked gently, although he felt a wave of anticipation surge through him. He was finally getting somewhere with her.

She opened her eyes, giving him a long, steady look. “You don’t need to get any more involved than you are.”

“The dress wasn’t the whole story, was it?”

She sighed, giving in. “No. There was something else, another reason they might be tailing me besides Jonathan. My boss, Jessica Lark, was murdered before the fire was set.”

So that was the murder she’d witnessed. Mark felt a chill go through him. “There were rumors that Lark had an assistant, but the name on the payroll records was a fake. There was no way to find out who you really were.”

“I was hiding from the press. Jessica kept my real identity off the books as a favor, especially when it turned out that we were the ones working on the wedding designs. I wanted my work to be taken seriously and not regarded as fluff because I was a rich girl playing with fashion.”

Mark felt a knot of suspicion forming in his gut. “You realize that doesn’t look good. Everyone thinks you’re the prince’s ex. The wedding was sabotaged. Lark was murdered. You would have been the prime suspect.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice growing hard. “I would be if you don’t know the whole story. But think about it. The police are good at their jobs. The whole thing with Jessica’s records slowed them down, sure, but the police should have been able to get past that.”

“So why didn’t they?”

She turned her face toward the window, speaking so softly he barely heard her, even with his excellent hearing. “The murderers don’t want me in police custody. For some reason, they want me and Jonathan for themselves. And to keep hunting all this time, I think they must have a lot of resources.”

Mark shifted his grip on the steering wheel. He had to get her to the safe house, and now it wasn’t just for her safety. Jessica Lark had been one of the Company’s agents. There would be questions. “Tell me the whole story.”

Bree’s mouth quavered and she bit her lip. “I was on the phone with Jessica when it happened. I heard the whole thing.”